Why last week was a good one for the ABC

Justin Milne, Michelle Guthrie and Malcolm Turnbull, smiling for the cameras at an ABC showcase event in Canberra in August. Pic: Alex Ellinghausen

All things considered, last week was a pretty good one for the ABC.

Sure, it was messy and as the Prime Minister Scott Morrison said yesterday (on the ABC) the board had “a pretty ordinary week”. But the organisation? All fine, for three reasons.

First, the wrong CEO has gone. Michelle Guthrie is a good person and a fine executive, but she turned out to be wrong for leading the ABC for an important reason, one that should inform the next appointment.

It was because she was unable successfully to lead the creation of content within the organisation or to represent, and preferably personify, what the ABC stands for, outside it, either to the public or the parliament.

Guthrie was hired for her experience and expertise in digital distribution at Google, but what matters for the ABC is not distribution but the stuff being distributed. Obviously the technology has to work properly, but the leadership needs to be focused above all on the quality of the content and on representing and defending the ABC in the community.

Mind you, she has been mounting a strong rearguard action and effective blame-shifting exercise, including producing material that shows she was rightly arguing to the board that the proposed Jetstream storage and distribution system was less important than the content, so maybe there is more to be learnt on this subject.

Michelle Guthrie - the wrong managing director. Pic: AAP

Second, the wrong chairman has gone.

Justin Milne was wrong for a different, but equally important reason: because he is a businessman and he’s on way too many boards.

As well as being chairman of the ABC, he is chairman of NetComm Wireless and MYOB and a non-executive director of NBN, Tabcorp and Members Equity Bank. One chairmanship is plenty, especially if it’s the ABC, but three, plus three other boards, is silly.

But it’s not just about being busy. The main problem with Milne was that being chairman of the ABC is not a business job, it’s public broadcasting, and when you’re so busy being a businessman in the rest of your life it would be difficult, if not impossible, to change personalities when you enter Ultimo and become a public broadcaster.

When Milne was telling Leigh Sales on 7.30 last Thursday that you don’t want to upset the people who supply you with money, he was talking as a businessman worried about financial stakeholders, as you do, not someone involved in public broadcasting, which is definitely NOT a business.

The key stakeholders for a public broadcaster are the public. Daylight is next, followed by the government of the day.

That order is partly necessary because governments change – quite often, in fact – and the ABC’s enemies in the Coalition and in the media will never be persuaded. They are implacable: absolutely no point sucking up to them. The only thing the ABC can and should do, is its job.

By the way, the accusation of bias that underpins a lot of the criticism of the ABC, and led to the chairman Justin Milne urging the sacking of two journalists, is absurd.

As someone who has worked in most parts of the Australian media, I can report that the ABC has the most infuriatingly diligent anti-bias and complaint-handling processes of any organisation. No one comes close to it in dealing with complaints, errors and bias, and no organisation is more genuine in trying to do the right thing, from top to bottom.

Justin Milne - the wrong chairman. Pic: AAP

Which brings us to the third reason it was a good week for the ABC: its independence from government interference has not just been bolstered, it’s been almost sanctified.

A lot of people who take the ABC’s independence for granted were shocked by the idea of a non-executive chairman, and friend of the prime minister, trying to get journalists sacked. As a result, everyone in government, and even some of the ABC’s enemies elsewhere, have been defending the ABC’s separation from politics.

The week just past will be a future reference point for the moat between the Australian national government-owned broadcaster and government that owns it – a stake in the ground.

Apparently, neither the prime minister nor anybody else contacted Justin Milne and told him to get Emma Alberici and Andrew Probyn sacked.

But we can now be sure that no politician will ring a future chair to call for a journalist’s head, and it will be a while before any ABC director utters a peep about journalistic bias, apart from asking for an update about the editorial processes, let alone tells the MD to shoot someone.

* Alan Kohler is the publisher of The Constant Investor and has also worked for the ABC for 23 years.